Although mobile robot research has been conducted for more than 20 years, there is still little impact on the manufacturing industry. Examples of successful products are, for example, lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, museum guides and toys. However, the technology used for these products can be difficult to use with the requirements of industry. However, there are applications where the manufacturing industry could benefit from mobile robots in order to increase the flexibility of the robot automation. One example is when manufacturing is made of large structures as components to, for example, airplanes, trains, boats, machines, oil platforms, bridges, buildings, power plants, wind mills etc. In the cases when automation technology is used for large structures, expensive large manipulators may be needed. Beside the high cost of these manipulators there is also an issue of moving the large objects to the fixed manipulators. Having mobile robots in these applications, the work objects could remain where they are manufactured and the mobile robots could instead move to the work objects.
A mobile robot can include a base portion and a plurality of parts movable relative to the base portion, and the base portion can be mounted on a movable platform. A base coordinate system can be defined in a fixed relation to the base portion of the robot. A work object coordinate system can be defined in a fixed relation to a work object located in the work area of the robot. The work object coordinate system can be calibrated in relation to the base coordinate system of the robot. When a calibration program for the robot on the movable platform is to be made, there are several issues that should be addressed. At first the placement of the mobile platform during the processing can be determined, and then the work object coordinate system should be accurately measured to be used in the process programs executed by the robot.
A technical issue using industrial robots on mobile platforms is that the calibration of a mobile robot relative a work object to obtain the accuracy needed for most industrial processes, can be difficult and time consuming.